


i will make you hurt

by cordsycords



Series: The Five Stages [2]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Character Death, Gen, Graphic Depictions of Scarring, Grief, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, The Lingering Soul Class, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Violence, and Death as well, the darkest timeline, the title is also a promise
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-30
Packaged: 2019-06-19 03:15:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15501105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordsycords/pseuds/cordsycords
Summary: They leave Molly's body behind. His soul, however, lingers on.Somehow, that just makes everything worse.





	i will make you hurt

**Author's Note:**

> There are five stages of grief. Welcome to anger.

There is not much to be done.

It is better, perhaps, that Lorenzo and his Iron Assholes left the body behind. She doesn't want to think about what might have happened to it if they had taken it. There are only dark places for her mind to go: it's jewelry taken, sold off to the highest bidder, the beautiful coat cut up into scraps, perhaps there's a black market desire for tiefling horns somewhere. Afterwards, what was left of the body wouldn't have been buried. It would have been thrown into a river, or cast out in the middle of a deep forest, forgotten and lost, left behind to be devoured by the maggots and worms.

So perhaps it is better that they return the next day and it's still there. Lying at the side of the road, wrapped up in the coat like a morbid present. It is better, but just barely. Lorenzo still had his fun, she realizes as she looks at its bloody cheek, the taunting symbol of the slavers carved into it with a rusty dagger, right over the beautiful peacock tattoo that once complimented it's bearer so well. Most of the jewelry is still gone, the heart-shaped pendant most noticeable of all, as well as anything they could grab from around its neck or fingers. The stuff that adorns its horns is still there, the coat is still intact, though it’s now covered in dark dried blood.

The three of them that remain standing around the corpse, Keg leaving them space to grieve. Beau can’t really tell what’s going on in the minds of Caleb and Nott. They’re both quiet. Caleb stares into the space in front of him, like he’s about to have one of his attacks, but his face is present in the moment, his mind hasn’t disappeared on them. Nott’s hand is grasped within his. Her other hand is covering her mouth, holding back any noise that may pass through it. Beau leans on her staff, every part of her body groaning with one type of pain or another. She pushes it down, works through it. She can’t hurt right now, she tells herself. There’s too much at stake for her to be lost in pain. The other two need her to hold it together. Caleb will drown himself in grief, Nott will just enable him, it’s suddenly come to her to get them through this.

“We have to bury it,” she says, voice unexpectedly hoarse.

“Ja, he— he should have—,” Caleb says, trailing off before he can reach the end of his sentence.

_He_.

Fuck, that’s such a weird word.

Because this body isn’t a _he_. _He_ is a word that implies that this body is something, someone. _He_ implies a joyous smile and a delightful laugh, combined with a hedonistic nature that was both annoying and admirable. This body is just a body. Nothing more, nothing less. It has to be just that, or else she can’t do what she needs to.

“We— we should clean him,” Nott speaks up, though it is little more than a mumble, “He liked being clean.”

“Yeah, let’s do that,” she agrees. Breaking the process into tiny little steps makes it easier to conceive. She kneels down by the body, gathering it into her arms. She is not a tall person, and it is bigger than her, and the billowing coat doesn’t help at all, but she ignores her screaming muscles and every thought in her head telling her how wrong this is and she picks it up. Looking up at the others, Caleb is looking at her in complete awe.

“Find his pack, if you can,” she gives him a command, it’s better to keep his mind busy, “He has stuff.”

It’s not an explanation, but Caleb gets the gist of it. He nods and then begins his search, dragging Nott behind him from where he hasn’t let go of her hand. They scour what’s left of the battlefield until they find the rest of Molly’s stuff. She hopes that it hasn’t been cleaned through. There was very little he owned that was useful to anyone else but him. If they’re lucky ( _lucky_ ) then only his money will have gone missing, but the rest of his possessions will remain.

“I-- I’m sorry. For what it’s worth.” Keg comes up behind her. Beau can feel her stare boring a hole into the back of her head, “I can carry-”

“No,” Beau interrupts, “It’s ours. We take care of our own.”

“Okay. Is there anything else I can do?”

“We need to find water.”

“What? Why would-” Keg starts, quickly silenced when Beau turns around and gives her glare, “Okay, water it is. I can do that. I can do water.”

Caleb returns a few minutes later, the Haversack on one shoulder while Molly’s pack hangs on the other, “I found whatever I could.”

“Okay, good Caleb. That’s good,” Beau pants, tired from the strain she’s putting her body through, “Keg’s gonna take us to water. We’re gonna follow her now.”

“ _Ja_ ,” Caleb mumbles.

Beau turns to Keg, whose expression could only be described as guilt, barely holding together for the sake of the others. The dwarf takes in their sad little party, four members are gone now, one of them probably for good, and nods before turning away. Nott grabs Caleb’s hand and follows afterwards, and Beau brings up the rear. The adrenaline rush of the previous two days has all but disappeared, the new task at hand pushing it to the back of their minds. This is not something they can rush.

They find a meadow a ways off the road, a rushing stream next to it that’s just started to freeze over and all of the sudden Beau is reminded that it is _cold_ outside. She leans the body up against a tree and nearly collapses down next to it. Her body screams at her as she gets back up again and goes to Molly’s pack, ruffling through it to find anything that may assist them. She wants to collapse next to it, to waste away as it does when the maggots finally come for it.

He carried a lot of shit in his pack, and even more in his coat, she discovers. There’s his tarot deck remarkably unsoiled by the blood, which she pockets without a second thought. She pulls out various herbs and soaps, things she’s seen him clean his coat with before. She also manages to find a glass eye, a stone mouse, a purple silk handkerchief, and what she guesses is the symbol of the Moonweaver sewed into the lining of his coat. She takes the coat off of the body and brings it over to the stream, sitting cross-legged on the ground next to it. She bends her head, and she gets to work, scrubbing and working at the embroidered silk with the ice-cold water of the stream. She’s sure to get frostbite from this, the cold biting at her fingers, turning them stiff. Her entire hand clenches around the bar of lavender soap that she uses, once kept in a neatly tied package in Molly’s pack. She doesn’t even think he ever had the intention of using it for its purpose. Knowing Molly, he most likely kept it for the smell. His stuff always smelled of lavender.

Behind her, the others work without her knowledge. Caleb summons his earthen cat paw with the rest of the energy he still has within him, digging a suitable grave to the hold the body. Nott grabs a couple of rags, soaking them in the stream before she sits by the body on her knees, washing the blood off of its skin. She starts with its cheek, wiping the dried blood off of the tattoo. The skin is still broken, so she grabs a needle and thread and stitches the skin together once more. The stitches are messy and uneven, but the peacock still shines brightly from underneath her shoddy needlework.

Keg sits idly by, unsure of what to do. Beau looks up for one minute to see that she’s left, and then does so again a few minutes to later to find that she’s returned, their lost horses in tow. Molly’s tapestry hangs across the back of the saddle, and Beau wordlessly gestures for her to remove it. She lays it in the hole that Caleb’s dug.

It is better than the ground. It is better than the most expensive coffin money could buy. It is a beautiful tapestry for all of its gaudiness. She remembers rolling her eyes when he got it when he came parading around to their room with it draped across his body. It was a pointless purchase, but fuck it made him happy.

When she’s done the others help her wrap in the body in the coat once more. It’s clean, at least, but the cold body doesn’t embody the coat as it once used to.

“I wrote a note for him,” Caleb says, grasping at a sheet of parchment in his hands. Beau recognizes the quality of the paper, it’s the stuff he normally uses for spells, “Just in case. So he knows his name, and where to find us.”

“That’s a good idea,” Nott says from beside him. They tuck the note into one of the pockets of the coat and drape the remaining fabric of the tapestry over the body. Caleb bends down before the cover it’s head, brushing a curl out of the way.

There’s not much else to be done.

 

 

They don’t return to the road until the next day, setting up camp a couple dozen feet or so away from Molly’s grave for the time being. They’re all tired, physically and emotionally, and they need some time before returning to their rescue mission with the same vigour they had when they began. They eat the food that Molly bought for them, the best you could possibly get on the open road. It doesn’t taste like anything.

“Shouldn’t we be saying something?” Nott pipes up as they eat, the only sound among them the crackling of their campfire.

“Say what?” Beau asks.

“Well, that’s what you do at funerals right? You talk about them? Remember all the good things that they did, tell stories about them?”

“I don’t know any stories,” Caleb says, “I don’t even think he knew many himself.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Beau grumbles, taking a bite of her food, “Motherfucker was just getting to the good stuff too.”

“From what I saw,” Keg says from where she sits about five feet away, “He was a good friend, and alley. And a decent person too. That’s rare,” she sighs, looking into the fire, “I’m sorry for your loss.”

Beau turns to her, “Thanks for… I don’t fuckin’ know really. I’m half inclined to blame you for this, in all honesty, but that feels like a really shitty thing to do with what just went down.”

“Molly wouldn’t want that,” Nott mumbles, hanging her head, “Do you think he was ready for it?”

Caleb shrugs his shoulders, “He lived every day like it could have been his last.”

“That doesn’t make it easier,” Beau says.

“No, it does not,” Caleb hangs his head, “ I am-- I am going to go to sleep. This day has been… too long.”

He sets his bedroll up a couple feet away, curling his body under the thin blanket. He falls asleep almost immediately, and when his quiet snores become the loudest sound around their campfire Nott goes to join him, curling up against his stomach.

“You should get some sleep,” Beau says to Keg.

“Are you sure? I could take watch.”

“Nah, I need some time. Alone,” Beau says. Keg gets up without another word, and she’s asleep ten minutes later.

Beau gets up and walks away.

 

 

There is no moon tonight. The air is frigid with frost. She shivers in her monk’s clothes, light and breathable, not made for the north. Her feet take her to the meadow, where a pile of dirt still sits on the ground, a body that once belonged to her friend buried beneath.

It feels like it happened so long ago. It’s hard to believe it was only this morning. Everything feels so stretched out and lethargic, like she’s swimming through a pool of taffy, every bit of the world around her trying to push back against her movement.

She doesn’t know why she came here.

“Fuck,” she says to the quiet air around her, “Fuck this.”

_Fuck you too Beau_.

“He was better, he was better than all of us. He was better than _me_ , he was better than _Caleb_. Fuck, he was better than Jes-- Oh shit,” She crumbles down onto her knees.

It’s been a long time since she’s cried like this. It’s not elegant, not the simple tear of a mourning widow, nor the quiet solemness of a soldier’s funeral. She doesn’t let herself cry very often. There is no other word for this than despair, her eyes puffy and sore as the tears fall freely. She can barely breathe through her nose, and her breath catches and heaves as she tries to keep from crying out. Her heart pounds against her chest, demanding that the pain she feels must not be ignored.

She lets out a silent scream. No noise comes out, but the force of her anguish tears at her throat. Her hands clutch her arms, nails piercing the skin.

“He was _good_ ,” she whispers, appealing to some unknown higher power, “He was _kind_ , and he was-- _argh-_ ”

She stands up and twists her body, throwing a curled fist into the rough bark of a nearby maple tree. It bites into her hand, breaking the skin and grinding against the bones. She cries out, though not because of the physical pain, and unleashes another punch against the tree. These aren’t the attacks that Dairon went over with her, they aren’t calculated or precise in any way. They are wild haymakers, left then right then repeat, sapping the little energy she has left over from her grief.

Her knuckles bleed freely, staining the bark of the tree with every hit. It stings more than usual, but she works through it. Everything hurts today, more than ever before, but she’s always been able to work through it.

With one final hit she breaks, falling against the tree trunk, exhausted. She heaves, can feel a rush of bile coming up her throat, but breathes to keep it down. To breathe is to live, Dairon always said, you must always remember to breathe.

“Well, at least someone seems to be mourning me properly.”

She vomits in the grass.

 

 

It looks like Molly. It walks and talks like Molly. It wears a stupid polychromatic coat like Molly.

“Great, now I’m fuckin’ hallucinating,” she can still taste the bile on her tongue. The apparition sits cross-legged on its own grave, holding its head up with an arm that’s propped up on its knee.

“Gods, I wish you were,” it says. It sounds sad, mournful.

She shakes her head, “No, you can’t be here. We buried you.”

“I don’t understand it either, Beau,” he says. It’s the way he says her name, soft and comforting, that makes her believe that he’s actually there.

Looking at him, he looks smaller somehow. His shoulders droop, his hair has lost a bit of its curl. His eyes don’t shine, and the smile he wears doesn’t reach the corners of his eyes. Beau knows the smile, she’s seen it many times on the faces of others. It’s the smile of a lier, someone who insists they’re not in pain for the benefit of others.

“So you’re haunting _me_ now? This payback or something?” She says. She can’t handle her own grief, let alone someone else’s, slipping back into lighthearted jabs at the other’s personality is well-known territory for them.

“No not you. You took something of mine,” he says, pointing to her robes.

She pats her hands across her body, feeling for his deck of cards within the fine, draping cloth. She takes it out with a gasp, dropping it to the ground like a hot coal.

It _pulsed_.

She reaches out with shaking fingers, picking the deck up once more. It gives off an aura of heat, and every couple seconds there’s a quiet vibration of a pulse against her fingers.

“Holy fuck,” she whispers.

“That just about sums it up,” he says.

“So, are you just… attached to these, somehow?”

“I guess. Can I see?” He holds out his hand. Beau scoots across the ground over to him, placing the deck into the palm of his hand. It falls through his outstretched fingers, down into the pile of dirt below them.

“Oh,” he says.

Beau reaches out to him with her hand, attempting to take his within her own. Her fingers go straight through his, going completely numb as they do so.

“Molly,” she starts.

He vanishes into the night.

She stumbles back to their campsite, collapsing to the ground in a heap of pain before quickly falling asleep. The deck is clutched in her hand, its quiet pulse answering her own.

 

 

“Beau! Wake up!” Nott shakes Beau awake, her grating voice quite adept at startling the monk. She leaps off the ground with a gasp.

“Fuck! Nott! I swear to—“

“It’s almost midday. We let you sleep in,” Nott says, gesturing towards Beau’s hands with a nod of her head. They’re covered in dried blood from the night before, already scabbing over. She flexes her fingers and the skin across her knuckles stretches, a sharp pain runs up her arms.

“Uh, thanks.”

“You did not wake any of us up when you came back, Beauregard,” Caleb says from behind Nott, staring at a layout of dried meats that he hasn’t touched.

“Yeah, I, uh, I had a weird night.”

“Apparently,” Caleb replies, they dryness in his voice noticeable and unappreciated.

Beau swallows a knot forming at the back of her throat, “You guys, you ever see things? That aren’t there.”

“ _Ja._ ”

“No.”

_“_ Well, I saw something. Last night. But you can’t call me crazy, all right? I swear it was real.”

“What did you see?” Nott asks.

“I saw Molly,” she says, blunt and honest.

The other two stay silent, looking at her with the most pitiful expressions they can muster. Her heart breaks. They don’t believe her.

“We should pack up the horses. We’ve lost a day now,” Caleb says, breaking the silence. He turns to his stuff without another word, and Nott does the same. Keg returns with the horses after letting them get a drink from the stream. She looks around at the other three, sensing the awkward tension in the air and deciding to keep the silence.

They’re on the road twenty minutes later, Keg up front with Caleb and Nott on one horse behind her and Beau bringing up the rear with the third. The sky is gray and dreary, and the wind whips around them. She shivers, curling in on herself in her saddle. Between shattering teeth she reminds herself of what she saw, of what she heard. She knows it was real. Caleb is projecting his own experiences onto hers, but he’s wrong because she knows what she saw.

She reaches inside her robes and grabs the deck of cards. The pulse is no longer beating.

She curses herself.

The others aren’t talking, so there’s nothing other than her own thoughts available to pass the time. She hates going into her own head sometimes, in this moment worst of all. Second-guessing herself is only natural, especially when the other two are second-guessing her as well. Doubt and pain settles over the entire group like a stinking miasma, and fuck if that doesn’t make her feel like shit.

Molly doesn’t show up for the rest of the day, or the next day after that. She keeps the deck of cards close to her chest but finds that it does not beat like it had the other night. In her boredom, she takes it out, shuffling it with impatient fingers. Molly could do tricks with them, could throw cards from one hand to the other, hide them up sleeves and within his coat and make them disappear in a blink of an eye, much to Jester’s amusement. She tries to move her fingers like he once did, but find their too stiff to complete the dextrous motions.

When they finally do get to Shady Creek Run by the end of the second day, Keg leads them to a brothel to stay the night. She pays for some company, thinks that Molly would want her to, and waits patiently in her room until a lovely half-elf with a bright red pixie cut knocks on her door.

There’s something about losing one’s self to absolute pleasure that makes her forget _everything_. She lets Ila (or at least she thinks that’s her name) to take the lead, placing Beau’s hands wherever she pleases across her bronze sweat-soaked skin. Her moans of pleasure are intoxicating, and Beau finds she’s happy to serve in whatever way she can. At least someone will be happy.

Ila leaves after midnight, the fire in the hearth burned down to its coals. She takes a second to breathe before she turns to grab her waterskin from where it got lost among her stuff on the floor.

“Well at least one of us is having a good time,” the familiar voice of her own personal wraith says from the corner of her room.

“Ah- fuck!” She shouts as she loses her precarious balance on the edge of the bed, falling to the ground. When she gets her bearings again, she looks up to see Molly sitting in the corner on the opposite side of the hearth.

“Dude! Why are— Where the fuck were you today?” She yells, throwing the first thing that comes into her hand at his face. One of her ball bearings goes straight through his head, rolling on the wooden floor. She growls under her breath, reaching for her leggings to tug them on without getting up from the floor.

“A hundred-fifty feet,” he sighs.

“What?”

“I thought I’d look on the brighter side of my current condition, if I can’t feel anything, perhaps I could still _see_ it all, get off this bloody fucking continent, food, money, and water don’t matter when you’re in the ground. But fucking— fucking one-fifty feet from those bloody _fucking_ cards,” he snarls, pointing a shaking talon towards where they lie amongst her cloak. His voice wavers between Common and Infernal. It’s the most negative emotion she’s ever seen from him.

She grabs the cards. The heartbeat is back once more, quiet and steady.

“Caleb and Nott think I’m insane,” she murmurs.

“I don’t think _Caleb_ of all people can judge,” he says.

“So… I guess this means you’re sticking around.”

“Fuck you, Beau,” he spits, intense crimson gaze turning to look at her, then at the deck in her hands.

“Hey, I’m trying to be _you_ right now. Y’know, making light of the shitty situation? It ain’t easy.”

His eyes flit between her and the deck, and all of the sudden she sees the beginning of a stupid idea dawning on his face, “I can think of a way to make this better.”

“Wai— what?”

“The deck,” he says.

“What about it?

“Destroy it, Beau.”

“What the? No!”

“Please, I’m begging you.”

“Molly, I—“

He lunged for the deck as she flinched away, his spectral hand nonetheless passing through her own,” Gods dammit, Beau.”

“We can talk to Caleb, he’s gotta-

“No!” He lunges at her once more, this time disappearing when he comes in contact with her body. All of the sudden, she feels every muscle inside her seize, the breath pushed from her lungs.

_No. No. No. NO!_

A pain shoots through her skull with every shout that rocks through her brain, echoing around her mind. She can hear it clear as day, but there are no words being spoken aloud.

The pain stops and all she feels is numb like she’s detached from her own body somehow. Her hand moves, but she doesn’t move it, she only watches on, hazy and numb. Her cheeks are wet, but they are not her tears, they are someone else’s tears.

She picks up the deck, it’s heartbeat loud and pounding now. She doesn’t have full control of her finer motor skills, it takes her a second to grab onto it, but after she does she’s dragging herself across the floor towards the burning coals in the fireplace.

Why is she doing this? She doesn’t want to do this.

_Please, Beau._

The realization comes to her as soon as she lets go of the deck, and it falls into the coals. The scream of pain rips through her mind and all of the sudden she feels as though she’s on fire.

_Molly._

Dairon’s voice nags at her in the back of her mind, telling her to breathe, to imagine her mind emptying like a river into the ocean, and with that breath push—

She regains the use of her body, Molly’s spectral form reappearing just next to her, his howls of pain gone from her mind but now out in the open, echoing in the small room. His form flickers and fades, dark, angry burn marks appearing on his body, spreading over his lavender skin. They cover his tattoos, turning them black and scarred. His clothes wither away as he writhes on the floor, revealing more burns all over his chest and torso.

She reaches into the fire and grabs the deck, cradling it against her chest. Her hand is burned but she doesn’t feel it. The heartbeat is there, quiet and slow.

“Fuck you,” Molly wheezes from the floor. What remains of his body is barely that, covered in thick, black scarring.

The door opens behind her, and she turns around to see Caleb and Nott standing in the hallway, the later with her crossbow drawn.

“Molly?” Caleb gasps.

And without so much of a goodbye, Molly disappears.

**Author's Note:**

> _whew_
> 
>  
> 
> Pain is a weird phenomenon. Emotional pain, especially the kind to do with grief, most of all. We all deal with it in different ways, some of them being lashing at those we love and respect. The whole point of writing these fics was to take what I was feeling and put it into something creative rather than destructive.
> 
> That being said, this is not a happy fic.
> 
> The lyrics come from the song _Hurt_ , originally written by Nine Inch Nails, and famously covered by Johnny Cash, the original lyrics are obviously meant to bring up thoughts of drug abuse and how the actions of one addicted to drugs can affect those they love and who love them in return.
> 
> I'm using them in a different context: people going through grief in unhealthy ways, lashing out at those they love, the anger consuming them preventing them from moving on.
> 
> Welcome to the second stage.


End file.
